Browsing tribe:

We’ve become incredibly efficient at producing animal products for humans. Through innovations in animal husbandry, animals can be reared for meat and produce more milk and eggs faster than ever before. Dairy cows, for example, produce four times more milk than they did 75 years ago.

Would you like to print out the weekly shopping in the comfort of your own home? Perhaps you're in the market for a new body part printed from your own cells? Click to discover how 3D printing will change your life.

Tesla Motors is exclusively an electric car maker, with Elon Musk expressing disdain for cars like the Chevy Volt and BMW i3, which pack gas-powered range-extenders. But Tesla may be working on a different kind of hybrid; a hybrid battery pack that could extend the range of cars like the Tesla Model S by up to 40%, allowing for 400 miles of driving between charges.

Modern lifestyles may not need to curb their appetites for smaller, faster smartphones and tablets when the digital age finally runs up against the physical limits of silicon-based computer chips. New research by Stanford University engineers might have just crowned a silicon successor by showing how to build a computer out of carbon nanotubes.

Speaking at the 2013 Social Good Summit, the Virgin Group founder and serial entrepreneur claimed that commercial space travel is about to become a reality and that his company is still on track to start offering out-of-this world mini breaks in 2014.

Ten years from now college might not look too different from the outside—the manicured quads, the football games, the parties—but the learning experience students receive will probably be fundamentally different from the one they get today.

Deep below Paris, in a vault that can only be opened by the simultaneous turning of three keys held by three different people, is the international prototype kilogram — the kilo against which all other kilos are based.

Elon Musk believes that Tesla Motors will be able to produce autonomous cars within 3 years. “We should be able to do 90 per cent of miles driven within three years,” he said. Mr. Musk didn’t reveal further details of Tesla’s autonomy project. Though he did say that it was “internal development”. “It’s not speculation,” he said.

Agriculture economists have long warned that farmers are getting old and staying on their land longer, delaying the turnover to a younger generation. But an Ohio State University professor argues that those fears are overstated and the United States likely will have little problem replacing aging farmers as long as business is good, as it has been for the past decade.

The annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is the event that's supposed to set the tone in technology for the oncoming year. Things have changed in recent years though. Technology has become less about whiz-bang gadgets and more about the Internet-powered apps and services we use. Twitter. Instagram. Snapchat. Dropbox. And so on. You don't really need 2 million square feet in the Las Vegas Convention Center to show off a bunch of apps.

At full speed, the Rimac Concept_One is little more than a cherry red blur, flashing from one corner of the horizon to the other in the blink of an eye. If its projected performance figures prove to be true, this radical electric concept car - the brainchild of an award-winning young Croatian designer - could accelerate faster than all but two of the fastest supercars on earth.

It is the plane that could finally end the argument over who gets the window seat. A firm attempting to build a private supersonic jet has revealed a radical new design where the entire cabin wall is a screen that can be turned into a giant window. Live video from outside the plane can create a panoramic image - or the passengers of the $60m jet can opt to have their family snaps shown or even watch a movie on the walls.

Is it possible that the 2016 presidential campaign is already a mess? You’re probably not thinking much about it, which is healthy. No wonder you’re looking so trim and your cheeks are pink. But the candidates in the thick of it can’t ignore the noise, and that’s not healthy.

Recycling is primarily an environmental issue, right? Wrong. In this modern age of disposability and rapid turn-over, recycling is no longer just about saving the planet, it's about feeding ever-growing economic demand. As Antony Funnell reports, the sheer enormity of the global recycling industry is challenging our understanding of terms like 'waste' and 'rubbish'.

Tesla Motors is currently aiming to have a self-driving, autonomous car built within the next three years, according to the famous Tesla CEO Elon Musk. If that goal is met, that means that Tesla will beat its rivals — Mercedes-Benz and Nissan — to the market by at least a couple of years.

Last we checked in with e-tattoos, Google (through Motorola) had patented electronics that would exist on or just beneath your skin in an effort to make voice-controlled devices more accurate, monitor your heartbeat, and that sort of thing. Now, the things are real and can store and transmit data, thanks to researchers at Korea’s Center for Nanoparticle Research.

Wal-Mart has unveiled a new prototype for a delivery truck it says will significantly reduce its delivery fleet's emissions. Walmart, whose fleet includes 6,500 trucks, 55,000 trailers and employs 7,000 drivers, announced in 2005 that it intended to double fleet efficiency by 2015. According to the company, fleet efficiency has increased by 84% since that announcement.

Living underwater is seen by some as a futuristic utopia, but what’s it actually like? Rose Eveleth asks a man who eats, works and sleeps on the sea floor – the latest in her new series about the people who have already experienced the future.

OSIRIS-REx (or Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer), a planned asteroid sample return mission, will soon have a spaceship. NASA approved the construction of a craft that will be able to travel to an asteroid, collect a sample, and return it to Earth.

Firefighters battle through many obstacles and hindrances when trying to control and extinguish fires among other hazards. Swedish designer, Omer Haciomeroglu, re-imagined the fire-fighters helmet by including a heads up display to offer improved vision and to inform the user of vital and extra information. The prototype has been dubbed the C-Thru Smoke Diving Helmet and is sponsored by the Umea Fire Brigade.

In a nondescript hotel ballroom last month at the South by Southwest Interactive festival, Andras Forgacs offered a rare glimpse at the sci-fi future of food. Before an audience of tech-industry types, Forgacs produced a plate of small pink wafers - "steak chips," he called them - and invited people up for a taste. But these were no ordinary snacks: Instead of being harvested from a steer, they had been grown in a laboratory from tiny samples of animal tissue.

Russia has drafted a program for colonization of the moon, and plans to send the first expeditions to build a permanent lunar base in 2030, the Russian Izvestia daily said Thursday, citing an official document.

In the future, virtual reality won't require strapping a bulky contraption to your head. Instead, imagine stepping into an empty room and then suddenly seeing life-size, 3-D images of people and furniture. Or looking down at a smartwatch and seeing virtual objects float and bounce above the wrist, like the holographic Princess Leia beamed by R2-D2 in the movie "Star Wars."

While the world’s only major fusion power effort — ITER — continues to trundle along, with an eventual first-fusion date of 2027 at a cost of more than $20 billion to taxpayers, there’s a small lab in New Jersey that says it can produce fusion power within a year, with a total spend of just a few million dollars.

The world is hitting its stride in technological advances and futurists have been making wild-sounding bets on what we'll accomplish in the not-so-distant future. Futurist Ray Kurzweil, for example, believes that by 2040 artificial intelligence will be so good, humans will be fully-immersed in virtual reality and that something called The Singularity, when technology becomes so advanced that it actually changes the human race irreversibly, will occur.

Electric car and rocket tycoon Elon Musk says that he'll put the first human boots on Mars well before the 2020s are over – and says he'll float his SpaceX company on Earth-bound stock exchanges once the interplanetary mission gets underway.

An elevated network of hover cars is to be built in Tel Aviv. A 500m loop will be built on the campus of Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) followed by a commercial network, according to skyTran, the company that will build it. Two-person vehicles will be suspended from elevated magnetic tracks, as an alternative transport method to congested roads, the firm promised. The system should be up and running by the end of 2015.